The End Of An Era

There is a club in downtown Toledo (aptly named The Toledo Club) that was founded well over a century ago by the glass barons and other industrialists and luminaries that served as Toledo's founding fathers: Edward Drummond Libbey and Michael J Ownes (Libbey Glass, Libbey Owens Ford and Owens Illinois), John North Willys (Willys Overland), Morrison R Waite (7th Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court), and David Ross Locke (newspaper publisher and abolitionist essayist). As with clubs like this in other cities, The Toledo Club was, for most of its existence, an exclusive bastion of old, rich, mostly white, men. Today, women are allowed to become members, and a few intrepid souls have done so, but for the most part the Club remains what it has always been: a place for men to get together in comfortable surroundings and do what men love to do -- talk, tell stories, share gossip, make contacts and deals, and indulge their taste for fine cigars and good liquor, all in an milieu free from the constraints (whether real or perceived) imposed on such activities by the "fairer sex."

Over the years, the Club has not escaped the campaign against second-hand smoke, and large portions of the Club are off-limits to smoking now. But there is one room -- The Oak Room -- where smoking continues to be allowed and where a simpatico bartender pours "three-fingers-in-a-rain-barrel" drinks of fine Scotch, Gin, Vodka, Bourbon or whatever else might suit the a man's fancy. Because of this, the Oak Room has become, for many, both the avatar and conservator of a great tradition.

The Toledo Club is not unique in all of this, of course, even in Toledo. The Country Clubs, originally founded by the same types of people who founded the Toledo Club for essentially the same kinds of purposes, have been through similar transitions. Yet there remains in each of these an "inner-sanctum" where the traditions are observed and defended from the seeming relentless forces of temperance.

All of the people who frequent such places have long shared one belief: that, having been driven so far underground, they were safe; that the smoking abolitionists would simply not be able to stamp out these last few islands of freedom. After all, we are talking about a single room in a private club! Surely they can't reach there without making smoking illegal per se!

Alas, how wrong they were.

Tomorrow, December 7, what is probably the most comprehensive smoking ban ever enacted goes into effect, state-wide, in Ohio. Passed by citizen initiative in the November elections, the ban technically extends only to places to which the public has access (bars and bowling alleys included). Private clubs are nominally exempted. However, there's a catch: to be a "private club,"you can have no employees.

There are creative lawyers (some in my own firm) working diligently on behalf of paying clients to find loopholes in this prohibition. They may do so, although I think it will be hard to find any that are likely to withstand scrutiny. But in reality the war is over. The abolitionists have breached the wall between the public and the private. Efforts to preserve that distinction will continue for some time, I think, but those will simply be the final skirmishes in a war that has already been lost. There is no place the smoking nazis cannot reach.

The tactical stroke of genius that made this possible was a shift of focus from patrons to employees. As long as the battle was being fought to protect "patrons" of establishments, there was considerable force to the argument that no person had an absolute right to enter privately owned places. If a person objected to or was concerned about the second-hand smoke, he or she could go to places that didn't allow it. In the end, the market would sort things out, with each business having to decide whether it would be better off with or without smoking. But, when the focus turned to employees, who have far less of an ability to choose where they work, that argument lost much, maybe all of its force. It is a common-place that business owners have a duty to protect their workers from work-place injury, and imposing an obligation to protect them from second hand smoke is a small step from the existing obligation to protect them from repetitive motion injury or other workplace ills.

Yes, I am a smoker, but that is not really the reason I find this sort of thing repugnant. I am always looking for a reason to quit, and now I have another one. My wife won't let me smoke in my house (indeed, even I don't like the smell) and my state will not let me smoke indoors anywhere else. So, maybe, finally, the lack of places to do it will make me quit. And, if it does, I will feel a twinge of gratitude.

But there is something inestimably sad about the outlawing of places like the Oak Room. (The same is no doubt true about the corner bar; I just don't go there too often). It is a reduction in the diversity of our society; another step in its homogenization. Hell, we do LOTS of things that are bad for our health. Driving being the poster child. But in our terror of "adverse health effects" and our insistence that the "majority rules" not just in most places but in all places, we are gradually eliminating the variation that makes life interesting.

Or so it seems to me.